My main thoughts would be these: Trying to find somesimple, single sentence explanation for something as complex andancient as religious faith is not very sensible. Beforeattempting to answer the question what role religion plays in people'slives, it would probably be a good idea to do some actual empiricalresearch. In this case, I think one would find that there are very,very few religious people, perhaps none, who would accept that the"meaning of life" can be boiled down to: We were created to live. Many people actually have done such research, and much has been written about the matter. There are many viewpoints, and there are no easy answers. But let me end with a question: Why do so many people seem to find it necessary to dismiss faith as a product of something trivial? What is it about faith that is so threatening?

Socrates famously said (roughly) that philosophy begins with knowledge of one's own ignorance. And I think any careful reading of this site would find most of us being extremely careful to add all kinds of qualifications and expressions of uncertainty to much of what we have to say. Of course, in some cases, we might claim to know something, but that falls rather a long way short of claiming to know everything.

This question does have a philosophical dimension, in so far as it forces us to confront the question in what sense belief is or can be voluntary: Can you simply choose to believe something absent a decent reason to do so? Many philosophers would say that you cannot, that belief is not really voluntary in that sense. But there are a number of other points worth making here, too, since much confusion seems to exist on this score: I don't myself know what is supposed to be meant by "the Christian God". Presumably, one means God as understood by Christianity, but there is no such thing. Christianity is a many-faceted and incredibly diverse collection of faiths and modes of living, and there are untold conceptions of God even within Catholicism (despite the repressive efforts of the church hierarchy). That so many people think that belief in God is somehow in conflict with the modern world is testament to the influence, especially in the United States, of one particular brand of religion,...

This is a difficult and somewhat contested question. Obviously, you cannot argue for the rules of argumentation except by arguing, and if there are rules of argumentation that must be followed if an argument is to be compelling, then one had better follow them. So there is, obviously, a kind of circularity in any such argument. But it is an unusual, and somewhat confusing, kind of circularity. The worst kind of circularity is what is called "begging the question". That is when you simply assume, perhaps tacitly, precisely what you want to prove. It's a bad kind of circularity because, if you assume that P, you can hardly help but reach the conclusion that P. That's not what's happening in the case we're considering. Suppose we're trying to prove the logical principle of disjunctive syllogism, which says that, if "A or B" is true and "not A" is true, then B must be true. We might argue for it as follows. Suppose that "A or B" is true and that "not A" is true. Since "A or B" is true, either A is...

The standard sort of response to this question is that God does not will evil. There has been a fair amount of discussion of this in connection with question 1 and question 80 . That said, it's another question whether one finds the resulting position at all plausible.

The obvious response is that this premise ...[I]n order to be responsible for my decisions, I must have chosen, in aconscious way, to be in the particular mental state I was in at thetime of my choice. is one we have little reason to believe. I don't see any particular reason to suppose I should bear no responsibility for my current decisions even if my current mental state was determined by causes outside my control. Perhaps one wants to say I'm not "ultimately" responsible, but then the question is why free will should require "ultimate" responsibility in that sense. These kinds of arguments often trade upon this kind of ambiguity.

The last question asked here can be treated more generally. When we speak of two people's having the same belief, what we mean is that they believe the same thing , where what they both believe is, say, that Margaret Thatcher likes hot dogs. Belief is usually regarded as a relation between a person and a "proposition", which characterizes the "content" of the belief. So to say that two people have the same belief is to say e.g. that both Bill and Sue stand in the belief-relation to the same proposition, say, that Bill has been unfaithful. Knowledge, too, is a relation between a person and a proposition. So the fact that Bill knows that he is unfaithful, whereas Sue does not, simply means that Bill stands in the knowledge-relation to this proposition, whereas Sue does not. There's no logical problem here, even though if is also true, as most philosophers think, that, to stand in the knowledge-relation to some proposition, you must also stand in the belief-relation. There is some controversy...

It's also worth saying that, although the Biblical accounts can be read in very different ways, and the Gospel accounts themselves conflict, all the Synoptics (Matthew 26:57-67, Mark 14:53-63, and Luke 22:66-71) present the Jewish authorities as rather upset with Jesus for claiming to be the Messiah and, indeed, as calling for his execution on those grounds. John presents the story rather differently, but agrees on this broad point. So it's not obvious Jesus himself was uniformly praised, and quite independently of the question I'll discuss next, it's clear enough that he was not. Self-proclaimed Messiahs were pretty common in those days, and they generally came in for rough treatment. There is quite a lot of controversy among scholars about exactly what role the Jewish authorities might have played in Jesus's arrest and execution, but the general view is that they probably played less of a role than the Gospels make it appear they did. Indeed, the remark in John 18:14, that Caiaphas had suggested ...

I guess I find the question strange, because I don't think of beliefs as "serving purposes". One might simply say that, if God exists, then the belief that God exists is true, and that's quite good enough. Then again, there is an interesting question what "belief in" something is. Zoltan Gendler Szabo has written a paper "Believing in Things" on this question.

I doubt your teacher's reasoning, too, but mostly on the general ground that Descartes didn't talk much about these issues and I, anyway, have a very hard time seeing how any sort of epistemology could lead to the justification of slavery. I mean, epistemology is important and all, but it is nonetheless limited in scope. It might interest you to know that a kind of early women's movement was based upon Cartesian principles, the idea being that the mind, being distinct from the body, was genderless.